Kamiko mini-review

I saw a video before release, saw it was cheap, so why not. Any excuse to get more things on my Switch. Not at all familiar with the developers, research show they made Fairune and Fairune 2, 2 games I never heard about. Weirdly enough, looking at videos they look like Hydlide-inspired games. Huh. Don’t look too bad though.

Presentation

This looks a bit generic. I’ve seen a lot of games that have a style very similar to this. Top-down pixel game. Really smooth graphically and everything is really small on the screen. No borders on the characters or enemies, not really stylized. The bosses are big and detailed though, quite like those. And the environments are pretty cool as well. Lots of little things that are just there to look good, lots of depth to things like walls and such so it’s clear what you can or can’t interact with. I’ve seen people compare the graphics to Hyper Light Drifter, a game I have yet to play (eventually maybe).

I didn’t really pay attention to the sound and music. Sorry! I’m sure it was fine, since I’m not complaining about it.

There’s no story.

Gameplay

So this is a top-down action game. You basically have to choose one of 3 characters, go through a few levels, and that’s about it. Once you’re done with a level you do a boss battle, then off to the next level.

It’s a fairly simple game. You can run, attack and interact with things. B to run, A or Y to attack (there’s a 3 attack combo). Holding the attack button uses mana to do a super attack. Speaking of mana (that’s what I’m calling it, I don’t actually know what it is), you shouldn’t waste it on super attacks, because you need it to open chests and unseal shrines. You get mana by killing enemies, so using mana to kill things is not terribly useful.

So the goal of each of the few levels is to unseal 4 shrines, get on the portal, then get to the boss battle. Each level also has a hidden mana power-up and health power-up, plus you get one of each before each boss battle. To unseal shrines you require 100 mana, but it’s not as simple as just walking up to them, most of them require finding in a maze or solving all sorts of puzzles.

There’s really not much more to say here. You have 3 characters, each of them has different attacks. Blue girl has a sword, green girl has a bow, and red girl throws a shield (and hits things with a dagger while the shield is away). They’re the same otherwise. And that’s about it.

Overall

The only replay value is if you want to redo the game with the other 2 characters. Finish the game with all characters and all the secrets (with just one of the characters I believe) and you get a sound test mode… disappointing.